


The Child and the Prophet

by farevenasdecidedtouse



Category: Winterstrike - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Fairy Tale Retellings, Gen, Mid-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-24 16:40:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17104265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/farevenasdecidedtouse/pseuds/farevenasdecidedtouse
Summary: The moment she realized what she must do.





	The Child and the Prophet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [straightforwardly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/straightforwardly/gifts).



_ Once, a great and heretical engineer created a screen to view the entirety of the cosmos. In infinite refractions of quantum foam and swarming nanites, its dead-eye surface reflected the flaws, the inefficiencies of creation, writ large. Reveling in these imperfections, anathema to his cold clockwork mind and thus disgusting and fascinating to him in equal measure, he failed to notice his enemies' approach from hyperdrive travel. Those he had betrayed with his rejection of conventional ethics and geometries had tracked him across time and space, and now struck at him with the force of the wronged and betrayed. Starfire bloomed silently through vacuum, explosions rocked the engineer's laboratory, and the screen shattered, sending fragments like constellations scattering across the galaxy. _

In the ironbird's eye, stars swarm like snowflakes, like the shadowy intimations of shape that have begun to appear to her in glass and ice alike.

The wintry thread of loss that connects her to the ironbird thrums as if plucked at odd times. She steps through feverish soirees hosted by old friends in their winter-ruined homes, laughter in the face of of thermodynamic inevitability, breaking off mid-conversation to languidly watch her companion dismantling a broken climate control box in one corner of the room. Wandering through the destruction of familiar neighborhoods near the starport, she pauses to stand near a low-atmosphere transport speared by ice shards like teeth, silently regarding the ironbird regarding the patterns of frost along each windowpane. Ever searching, ever restless and affectionate and curious, the ironbird follows as she leads before being occasionally confused into leading for her to follow.

She sees more and more through thin sheets of ice, flicking like lenses over her eyes as she regards the city around her.  Every night spent in a cold, stone-paved alley curled around her constant companion draws her further into a blissful suspension of thought and life like dream, like cryostasis. The brightly painted screens of obfuscation she draws about herself seem enough to fool - she flirts and sways and sparkles as before, committing her petty thefts and revelries with the grace of an acrobat or mime and laughing off her associates' interest in the ironbird with allusions to a new, fashionable model of birdplane. Her assignations proceed as they always have, for gain or rarer and rarer distraction, or simple experiments in sensation - with each she draws into herself, something beyond human writhings and fluids, chilling each partner in her new dance with the burgeoning cold inside of her to leave them as torpid-restless as herself.

_ A fragment of the engineer's code quantum entangled itself with a much simpler creature, a newborn artificial intelligence beloved of the human child raised alongside it. Warped into something unknowable and terrible, fragmentation and self-contradicting subroutines pervading its consciousness, the intelligence disappeared from its creator's databases, its path scrambled into data fragments like jagged ice and impenetrable cloud. The human child wept, then resolved to reclaim the being she loved, taking to the stars for coordinates divined from little more than corrupted error logs and hope. _

On the evening the way forward crystalizes, she sits in a circle of acquaintances on mandala-patterned rugs stolen from some warehouse near the spaceport. The room is cold and her companions complain and pull scarves and rugs close around oddly hunched shoulders, but between sips of smokewater hot and bright enough to provide an intellectually interesting contrast to the icy purity at her core, she feels nothing but the faint heat of the drink and the ironbird's eyes on her. Someone seems to be telling a story she remembers from her childhood, one she has once loved, then scorned as frivolous, then forgotten until now. In her mind, it crystallizes into a map, a path through words to the truth at its center. The controlling intelligence of the new order, symbolized by the creature who has bonded with her as inexorably as child to parent, as lover to lover. 

The ironbird settles into her arms with a sound like distant windchimes and she presses it to her chest, the beat of her heart synchronizing with the flick of its star-spark eyes. Not long after, she excuses herself from the gathering.

The increasingly shabby and pale streets lead her, circuitously but inexorably, into the labyrinth the winterstrike has made of her city. Around her the night glows with light refracted from the day's newest pristine snowdrifts into light to equal and surpass the cloud-shrouded Irian daylight. The glow of the snow lights her path through each crazily-angled building, each huddled cluster of Irians displaced by the cataclysm. Some eye her with curiosity or covetousness, gazing momentarily at the ironbird for a source of interest, or scrap metal, before her sky-blank gaze (and the pistol at her side) send their concentration hurriedly back to emberstones or companions' faces. This time the ironbird leads, seemingly surer of her devotion than before the cold alleys and colder looks at those who might use it for anything other than its inborn purpose.

_ Braving the frozen expanses between stars, bargaining with wild ravenfolk and fungal intelligences and, once, a smuggler with a smile sharp as her star-daggers and a starship with branches of navigational dendrites like antlers, the human child made her way to her star system's apex, a planet claimed long ago by an apocalypse that sent the bravest and hardiest of its colonists scattering from its lifeless surface. In an ancient temple, trapped in a logical paradox imparted by the engineer's warped data, she found her friend. Opening its mind with the atonal sonic repair routines imparted to her by their mother-creator, she gently remapped the corrupted code, each transistor and datum falling once again into its correct place with the force of her intelligence and devotion. Restored by this knowledge to its original processes, the intelligence embraced its human companion, knowing they would never again be parted. _

The stars she cannot see pale beside the light of the snow, magnifying, intensifying the reflections of every surface. Each turn, each adjustment of her trajectory is a portion of a spell, another stitch in the tapestry, another beat of titanic wings greater than either of them, until she finds herself in the ironbird's eye - a cratered pit near Iria’s outskirts, some built-over portion of ancient infrastructure now torn open by the merciless winter.

The center of a telescope, focusing her mind with chill clarity as snowflakes bejewel her hair, her clothes, her upturned face turned toward the snow-lighted sky - caught between mirrors, between reflections of the ironbird's ice-clear purpose, she understands.

A map, an ice-puzzle, the culmination of evolution and engineering. Her destiny - its protector, its accomplice, its prophet.

The snowflakes swarm around her, white bees to their queen.

**Author's Note:**

> Despite the fact that our views of canon are pretty antithetical, (okay, the ironbird's very sweet sometimes and killing it is admittedly sad, but it's sort of like "honey, you're literally causing the apocalypse here, I have to put you down,") I couldn't pass up the opportunity to write something for probably my single favorite IF game of all time ever, so I hope the result is satisfactory. Happy Yuletide and many happy returns.


End file.
